Christie shreds his bipartisan cred: Column

Jan. 12, 2014
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday. / Mel Evans, AP

by Ross K. Baker, USATODAY

by Ross K. Baker, USATODAY

After he was elected governor of New Jersey in 2009, presidential speculation about Chris Christie heated up very quickly. His defeat of an incumbent Democrat was big news. His win -- and that of Bob McDonnell as governor in Virginia -- were resoundingly negative referendums on President Obama and they foretold the 2010 election that would give birth to Tea Party movement.

But Christie's victory reverberated even more dramatically than McDonnell's because New Jersey is not a swing state but genuinely "blue." It endowed Christie with bipartisan credibility and held out the hope that this forceful and occasionally bumptious new governor would give the GOP a candidate with crossover appeal and a shot at something that seemed to be eluding its grasp -- the White House. Gov. Christie bought into that narrative and its pursuit has now stalled his presidential quest as firmly as a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge.

Christie's approach to governing has been based on a delicately calibrated strategy: enhance the bipartisan appeal without needlessly antagonizing the party's right wing, which could make his path to the nomination very painful. Accordingly:

He finessed certain issues such as same-sex marriage by not ordering an appeal of a lower court decision that allowed gays to wed.

Sensitive to the GOP's problems with Latino voters, he approved a very narrow version of the "Dream Act" that enabled some young illegal residents of New Jersey to receive in-state college tuition.

Wary of venturing too far down the path of centrism that had been the undoing of such Republican hopefuls as former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, Christie lavished an ample supply of red meat on the plates of party conservatives. The signature dish was an all-out attack on public service unions. He singled out public school teachers for public scolding, but his ultimate weapon was the widespread approval of charter schools. His aggressive approach to ridding the schools of unionized faculty could be summed up as follows: lots of charter schools are good; more charter schools are better, and too many charter schools are just right.

Christie's take-no-prisoners approach came down to this: you don't just want to soundly beat your opponent. You want to exterminate him.

To this end, he engineered a re-election campaign that had an objective even grander than mere victory. Christie sought the humiliation of state Sen. Barbara Buono by running up the score on her, not just with Republicans and independent voters, but also by cutting into Buono's own base of registered Democrats.

Gov. Christie - fearing that running for re-election on the same day as Cory Booker, Newark's popular mayor, would draw Democrats to polls and reduce his victory margin - ordered a separate election day for Booker's run for the U.S. Senate.

Christie also pursued aggressively the endorsements of prominent Democratic officeholders such as mayors of the state's municipalities, officials who are dependent on state aid and sensitive to staying on the right side of a governor. He picked up a number of endorsements, but there were those who clung loyally to the Democratic nominee even though Buono was, at one point, down by as much as 40 percentage points in the polls.

One of the holdouts was Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich. At the western end of the George Washington Bridge, Fort Lee is not a very big place. It is a measure of the Christie campaign's impulse to run up a score and burnish his victory with the help of Democratic votes that caused some of the governor's closest aides to punish Sokolich by the vengeful and irresponsible act of closing down Fort Lee's usual access to the bridge, causing traffic jams that lasted days. They compounded the offense by lying about the reason for the lane closures.

On Thursday, Christie announced he had fired Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly, whom he blamed for the bridge closure. But the buck stops at the governor's desk. And if the quest for bipartisan credibility is seen to be purchased at the price of mean-spirited vindictiveness, Christie's appeal will evaporate.

Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.